G3 Uses, Upgradeability (I made up a word!)

I am thinking of buying from a friend a G3 to use as an iTunes server. He isn't quite sure what model it is, but it is one of these:

The Computer
It is one of the G3's in that form factor, with that one thought to be it. I would upgrade the hard drive and RAM, but I do not know to what levels, (e.g. 250GB Raptor SATA drive and PCI card? 80GB ATA?). He wants $20 for it. Does this sound like a good deal? What other uses could this G3 serve instead of just an iTunes server?

Ram will go up to 768, hard drive is IDE, so bump it up as high as you like. It's not really worth throwing a raid card in there just to use SATA. If you bump up the ram and hard drive, it would function as a pretty good iTunes server, as well as an all purpose machine. She'll run basic stuff fairly well, just don't do anything processor intensive. It won't run Panther without XPostFacto, but if you went that route, it would slow down substantially. So, best to toss Jaguar on it. You could also use it as part of a render farm, if you do such things. I knew a guy who used a pile of G3 iMacs as a render farm, and they're not much faster than the machine you're looking at.

Bottom line, however, for $20, it's too good a deal not to find a use for it.

Duff-Man says...if it is in working order, $20 is almost a steal. As said above, loading 10.2 will work great with a bit of extra ram which should be easy to find relatively cheap. If you don't end up using it for music serving, then it would make a great computer for somneone that just needs basic web and email and word processing - there is still some good life left in those beige G3's....oh yeah!

$20 certainly is a steal for any G3 (for now ), But personally, I'd prefer a tower, more room for drives. Also, keep in mind that it is affected by the 137GB limit, so a PCI ATA card (like the Sonnet Tempo/Tempo Trio) would be necessary.

The CPU ZIF can be upgraded from the original 233 or 266 MHz G3 ZIF to a 1 GHZ G4 or a 1.1 GHz G3 ZIF (make sure you have a compatible VRM before doing this). There are 2 spare drive bays. There are 3 PCI slots. You can put a PCI graphics card in 1 slot (128 MB Radeon 9200), a FireWire/USB card in the 2nd slot, and an ATA 133 card in the 3rd slot if you need to use larger/extra drives (might also need rev C ROM if you want master/slave drives). 768 MB RAM. OS X 10.2. With this configuration, you can do almost anything that a Mac can do, with the exception of intensive games and complex rendering. Be careful not to spend too much on upgrading, however, because you will end up near or beyond the price of a new Mac, and you're still limited by slow RAM and bus speeds.

I had that computer until recently... sold it for around $50. I toyed with the idea of upgrading it like you are talking about doing, but I realized that in the end, the cost of all the upgrades got me close to a new computer. Not worth it, IMHO, because as macindoc says, it will always be limited by certain limitations that you can't get around. So my advice to you is only buy it if it can be useful to you without a fortune spent on upgrades.

Mine was a Rev A, but accepted additional drives as long as they were attached to a PCI card and not the original ATA bus in a master/slave config. The other limitation, however, is that the startup drive has a max size of 8 GB, so any drive larger than that has to be partitioned to be the startup drive.

I have Beige G3 tower I picked up about 20 months ago for use as a web, mail, file, CVS, and mailing list server. It works great under 10.2. $20 for that is a great deal. Go for it. You'll pay twice that much on shipping alone if you buy a old computer from eBay.

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